Cellular phone calls none too private

Holly Yeager, EXAMINER WASHINGTON BUREAU

Published 4:00 am, Saturday, January 11, 1997

WASHINGTON - When a conference call among House Speaker Newt Gingrich and other GOP leaders was picked up by people with a radio scanner, then tape-recorded and passed on to news organizations, it showed just how easily snoopers can eavesdrop on cellular telephone calls.

"Most people haven't the slightest idea how vulnerable they are," said Peter Neumann, a computer security expert at SRI International, a nonprofit research group in Menlo Park.

The spread of wireless communications, such as cellular and cordless phones, has made it easy for eavesdroppers to use the same devices - some as inexpensive as $80 - to pick up personal and business chats.

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Since 1983, it's been against federal law to make or sell scanners that can pick up cellular phone calls. But old scanners can still do the trick, and new scanners require just a little illegal tweaking to be able to hone in on the frequencies where cell phone conversations bounce around.

By contrast, listening to a traditional phone line requires an old-fashioned tap - that is, a physical connection to the desired line. Only law enforcement officials with a court order are legally permitted to listen in this way.

It's also illegal in most cases to intentionally intercept cellular phone calls. But experts say it happens all the time.

In the latest high-profile example, a couple in northern Florida who don't like Gingrich came across the GOP leaders' Dec. 21 conference call while listening to their scanner. The interception was possible because one of the conference-call participants was also in Florida and using a cellular phone.

In the conversation, the speaker and his allies discussed how they would respond to the disclosure of the House ethics panel's charges against Gingrich - despite a promise from the speaker to the panel that he would not orchestrate a counterattack against those charges. The Florida pair passed the tape to a Democratic congressman, who in turn gave it to several news organizations, which reported the incident Friday.

"I think most of us assume that no one's all that interested in what we have to say," said Charles Kennedy, a professor at Catholic University's law school in Washington who studies new technologies.

"But if you're Speaker Gingrich, maybe you want to be more careful."

Barry Fraser, a spokesman for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, says new digital telephones, while more expensive than cellular phones, offer far greater protection.

But Fraser says if people want to telephone confidential or sensitive information to someone, they should use a traditional land-line phone.&lt;